A few days back twitter acknowledged that it might have used phone number and email address provided by customers for account protection, for advertising. While such lapses are not unheard of in the advertising world, the penalties these days are a lot stronger than they used to be.
Obtaining user consent is essential when the data they provided is being used for advertising purposes. Failure to do so can lead to legal implications in some of the world’s largest countries. Implications can include lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, massive fines besides damage to reputation, brand image and customer trust.
Getting user consent for use of their data to market to them can be hard. This is because if the question was asked to customers, most of them would express some form of concern. So, majority of the organizations get around this by adding marketing related vague verbiage to their Terms and Conditions when you are buying their product or accepting the use of their digital platforms. Most of us in our sane mind will not read through the entire terms of conditions to find nuances that we do not agree with.
But there are some of us who do like to read the entire fine print like lawyers. As good people they do the job of bringing forth these issues in public light. I cannot think of a better example as the article I read in 2012 on Business Insider, right when Pinterest was taking off as a social media platform. This article was about image rights.
“She browsed Pinterest’s Terms of Use section. In it she found Pinterest’s members are solely responsible for what they pin and repin. They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.”
While the language around responsibility and accountability was fairly clear in the above statement, the language around user consent is often left vague and broad in its scope. This is done to allow organizations the wiggle room to use the data for various reasons without the need to seek explicit approvals from customers for their specific use case.
In Twitter’s case, they brought forth this news because they were clearly off-guard. Data that was collected for the purpose of security authentication is off limits for use in advertising if explicit user consent wasn’t taken. This also brings forth an interesting question – if they hadn’t disclosed it, would they have been caught? My guess is yes, they might have gotten caught now or maybe in the future.
The reasons for my guess are a few:
- Employees have a conscience and they are not afraid to speak out to press/publications on a wrongdoing – If you read tech news regularly, you will see there is enough news leak happening especially around tech companies that break rules. Below are some cases:
- Researchers and tech
enthusiasts are always finding loopholes in the way organizations work and
operate
- Jonathan Mayer a researcher at Stanford wrote a report on 2012 on Google’s circumvention of the Safari cookie blocking feature. Once this report came out, Google faced a few fines and a few lawsuits that are still in the works
- There are a lot of privacy
related research institutes (Center for Internet and Society) as well as
organizations like Mozillla who do a lot of relevant research in this matter.
They often take out research papers and articles to inform, educate and ignite
dialogue.
- I read an amazing research paper in 2012 on tracking and it opened my eyes to the sophistication of data capture and need to understand it
In short, privacy and data use is a topic that is close to a lot of organizations and user groups. With every passing day and new articles, consumers are starting to form strong opinions. Cambridge Analytical scandal definitely made people take notice to the importance of protecting their data. All the effort from organizations like Mozilla is further making consumer sensitive to this issue. So, it is important for organizations to be transparent with their data use policy, privacy policy as well as their user consent language for marketing and advertising needs.
Most of the large scale advertisers are always scared about brand safety when they use platforms that have access to a large amount of data. So, they do expect most of the large advertising platforms especially paid social marketing channels like Facebok and display advertising channels like Google to do the right thing by customers.
